Did you set SMT (Hyperthreading) scheduler support and Multi-core scheduler support in your kernel config?

Yep got both of those enabled, basically I've used the kernel posted here (by someone else who thankfully did a lot of the hardwork on sussing out kernel options for this laptop).

Am I perhaps mis-interpreting the output from lshw and both cores are enabled?_________________"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." - Donald Knuth

Because I was intending on writing up a HowTo on installing Gentoo on this particular laptop and figured a description of all of the hardware would be useful as a starting point and lshw provides that in nice html output that embeds in a wiki easily (from what I've read these ship with two variants on the wireless front so I wanted to make it crystal clear which I had for potential readers).

Checking as you've suggested...

Code:

# grep /proc/cpuinfo processor
processor : 0
processor : 1

So that looks more promising, although why would a lower rated processor (BillWho's i3-2350M compared to my i5-2467M) have four processors showing when all the entries here show laptop i5's as having two cores?????

Also, whilst /proc/cpuinfo tells you whats there, is it telling you what is actually enabled as the output of lshw is purportedly doing? Two processors, each with two cores each according to the full output from /proc/cpuinfo but are these enabled (i.e. four cores total)? lshw suggests not, any other way of checking?